Trump vs. the Bushes: A political rivalry of its time

President Donald Trump had nothing but words of praise for George H.W. Bush in the hours following his death Friday, dubbing the 41st president a public servant of “sound judgement, common sense, and unflappable leadership” who “always found a way to set the bar higher.”

But there has been no shortage of enmity between the Bush family and their most immediate Republican successor in the Oval Office.

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Here’s a look back at some of the sharpest barbs exchanged between Trump and perhaps the GOP’s most storied political dynasty.

April 2013: ‘No more Bushes!’

Trump’s swipes at the Bush family began as far back as five years ago, long before he rode down the gilded escalator of Manhattan’s Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his longshot bid for the White House.

“We need another Bush in office about as much as we need Obama to have a 3rd term,” the future president wrote online in 2013. “No more Bushes!”

Trump echoed that line of attack throughout the GOP primary battle, which featured former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — whom the billionaire real estate mogul relentlessly branded as “low energy” and eventually vanquished.

“Enough is Enough- no more Bushes!” Trump tweeted in August, appending a link to a video on Instagram depicting various political gaffes by Jeb Bush and the two most recent Republican presidents. Featured in the clip was George H.W. Bush’s infamous declaration: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

February 2016: Barbara Bush unloads on Trump

Appearing alongside her son, 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush, in an interview with Norah O'Donnell of CBS, Barbara Bush derided Trump and likened the GOP primary frontrunner to a “comedian” and a “showman.”

“I don’t know how women can vote for someone who said what he said about Megyn Kelly,” the Bush family matriarch added, referring to Trump’s assessment of the then-Fox News anchor’s pointed debate questions. "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Trump had said.

In a separate interview to CNN that same month, the former first lady was even more forceful: "I'm sick of him,” she said.

"He doesn't give many answers to how he would solve problems. He sort of makes faces and says insulting things," Barbara Bush said. "He's said terrible things about women, terrible things about the military. I don't understand why people are for him, for that reason."

Following Barbara Bush’s death in April, the White House announced Trump would not attend her funeral to “avoid disruptions due to added security, and out of respect for the Bush Family and friends attending the service.”

February 2016: Jeb Bush and Trump spar over Iraq and the Bush legacy

Responding to a question about a 2008 interview in which he said that it “would have been a wonderful thing” if congressional Democrats had pursued impeachment against former President George W. Bush, Trump called the Iraq war “a big, fat mistake.”

“The war in Iraq — we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it,” Trump said at a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina. “Iran is taking over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty.”

Jeb Bush, one of the six GOP candidates onstage, told moderator John Dickerson of CBS News: “I am sick and tired of him going after my family.”

“My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind,” Jeb Bush continued. “While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. I’m proud of what he did.”

Bush also lashed out at Trump for having “the gall to go after my mother,” adding: “I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago, looked up and saw my mom. My mom is the strongest woman I know.”

October 2017: George W. Bush takes on Trumpism

George W. Bush delivered his most articulate rebuke of Trump’s administration yet in a speech at the “Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In The World" event in New York, telling the audience that the United States’ national identity “is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood.”

The former president remarked that Americans had seen “our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” “nationalism distorted into nativism,” as well as “the return of isolationist sentiments.”

“In all these ways, we need to recall and recover our own identity,” Bush said. “Americans have a great advantage: To renew our country, we only need to remember our values.”

November 2017: George H.W. Bush calls Trump a ‘blowhard’

In "The Last Republicans” — a book by presidential historian Mark K. Updegrove published in November 2017 — George H.W. Bush was quoted calling Trump a "blowhard,” and George W. Bush suggested Trump incited and exploited voters’ anger to advance his 2016 presidential bid.

A White House official punched back on CNN, telling the network: "If one presidential candidate can disassemble a political party, it speaks volumes about how strong a legacy its past two presidents really had." The official went on to call the Iraq war “one of the greatest foreign policy mistakes in American history."

June 2018: Dynasty killer

In a tweet this summer, Trump bragged of quashing the “Bush Dynasty,” equating the family to the Clintons, special counsel Robert Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” the “Fake News Media” and other institutions he perceives as attempting to thwart his presidency.

“I’ve had to beat 17 very talented people including the Bush Dynasty,” Trump wrote online, “then I had to beat the Clinton Dynasty, and now I have to beat a phony Witch Hunt and all of the dishonest people covered in the IG Report...and never forget the Fake News Media. It never ends!"

That same day, the Justice Department’s inspector general released its watchdog report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, finding that the bureau’s management of the high-profile case was not influenced by political bias.

“I beat the Clinton dynasty. I beat Bush dynasty,” Trump said during an impromptu interview with Fox News outside the White House. “And now, I guess hopefully, I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence.”

At a campaign rally in Great Falls, Montana in July 2018, Trump made a bizarre broadside against "a thousand points of light" — a favored expression of George H.W. Bush that he used to characterize community volunteer organizations and employed in various speeches, including his 1989 inaugural address.

“The thousand points of light, what the hell was that, by the way?” Trump said. “Thousand points of light, what did that mean? Does anyone know? I know one thing: Make America Great Again, we understand. Putting America First, we understand. Thousand points of light, I never quite got that one. What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out? And it was put out by a Republican, wasn’t it?”